London Belongs to Me (Penguin Modern Classics)

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This looseness comes despite lovely touches such as the sparky dialogue when Percy Boon takes a shine to a girl working at the funfair (“She wasn’t good looking, judged by the top standards.

As dusk falls, the Park in the background becomes vast and mysterious, and the gas lamps that light your way along the main paths dwindle into the distance like lanterns in Illyria. Much o the interest of the book is her comparing the Belgian way of looking at things versus the Japanese way of looking at things, and Amelie has no prejudice. When the novel opens, she’s still living at home, but this changes as she discovers a life outside the tight boundaries set by her parents.There is an overweight man, moving from unskilled job to unskilled job, with adenoids and an obsession with food. Even the two characters who seem the most ludicrous comic relief are given intensely moving deep POV and powerful story elements.

Percy is quite the young man on the up, making a name for himself as a successful mechanic, with dreams of owning his own garage one day. I was attracted by its newness, its title – I love London-based writing – and its cover photograph, a street scene by the Austrian photographer Wolf Suschitzky. I now have a much better idea of why it was so very popular in the 60s and 70s, before it fell into the deep trough that seems to await novels, until they are revived 20 years later. Well, it’s outrageous that this novel of maximum fun could ever have been forgotten (it was a big hit in 1945). In addition, the reprints of John Healy’s The Grass Arena have a quote from Daniel Day-Lewis on them, and John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (out in April) will have a quote from Robert Macfarlane, who provides the introduction.After all, they are living in a world which allows – indeed obliges them – to make choices about their personal beliefs. The action takes place entirely within London, apart from a handful of scenes in the Home Counties, much of which has since been swallowed by London’s growing sprawl. When tragedy strikes, the house must come together to fight, with the true characters of the residents being revealed as they struggle and make sacrifices to try and keep their Dulcimer Street family together. It, and it’s characters, have always stayed with me and I was delighted to read it again when I found a second hand copy a couple of years ago. This is a novel about the lives, with all their trials and tribulations, and successes and failures, of a diverse group of people, struggling to cope with everyday life, in most cases on a very meagre budget.

There was also a six-part television series in 1977, again with a roster of the best of British, including a young Trevor Eve. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. One of the great city novels: a sprawling celebration of the comedy, savagery, eccentricity and heroism . On the top floor lives Mr Puddy, a widower who, like most of the tenants and the house itself, has ‘known better days’. I have Saramago’s Blindness here, but like you I am discouraged by the long sentences and unbroken paragraphs, though others tell me he’s gripping once you attune yourself to his pace.The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Norman Collins' story, which is Dickensian in the richness of its pathos and kindly humour, has been triumphantly captured on the screen. So much happens – often of a banal but diverting nature – that to reveal some of it would be not so much spoiling as inadequate. There is one major difference with respect to Sillitoe’s vernacular novels: his characters are resolutely, rebelliously, proletarian; but the residents of 10 Dulcimer Street, especially the landlady, wield their shabby genteel (with the accent on the former adjective) lower middle class manners like weapons, and keep their proverbial aspidistras flying like battle colours.